Laying down on my inflated ground pad, inside my fluffed sleeping bag, cocooned inside my tent for the night, is a miraculous feeling. That’s where I am now, having finished cooking dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up afterwards, sorting tomorrow’s food out from the rest, cleaned my face and hands and brushed my teeth, and gotten everything stowed properly in the tent. It’s warm, it’s reclined. It’s just perfect.
Let’s talk about last night though. The rain that had been my daylong companion stopped as I set up camp, and I had a wonderfully dry evening to cook and eat and do my end-of-day routine. But shortly after I got in my tent, it started again. Just a little pitter patter at first, but the intensity grew and grew until rain was hammering away at the tent. Then the wind picked up. The gusts were so strong they completely deformed the tent as they blew, changing its shape from something like a little spaceship to, say, a whale, and then a comet, and then a donut (for mathematically inclined readers: yes, the wind was so strong it pulled off non-homeomorphic deformations). I don’t think I’ve ever had this tent in wind that powerful, and honestly I didn’t think it would survive. It did though, as did I. After an hour or two of sitting up and helplessly using my hands to try to hold it all together, things calmed down a bit, and I could relax my vigilance enough to sleep.
The wind continued throughout the day today. There was little rain, a lot of cloud cover, and wind so strong that when it would gust, it blew me over a couple times. I had to stop walking when it blew hard so that both feet could hold the ground, or else I would be toppled. It was particularly strong when I was up high, crossing passes on the King-Kaweah Divide. There is nothing to break the wind up there. Just mountains to funnel it, make it more concentrated, and me, a little twig poking up in places that perhaps I didn’t belong.
I woke up tired, but I was worried about more unstable weather and wanted to get through the high stuff as quickly as possible. Shortly after I started walking, I crossed Pterodactyl Pass, and then made a long contour above a bowl, making my way to Horn Col. From there I made a long contour above the head of a canyon to Copper Mine Peak (and pass), where the wind was at its fiercest as I struggled along an exposed ridge at around 12200 feet. The descent from there ought to have followed an old trail from when Copper Mine Peak sported a functional copper mine oh so long ago, but the trail is hiding under snow so instead I took a steep scree hill down off the pass, followed by slipping down in the snow, and then a long talus-y descent of several thousand feet into Cloud Canyon. There were many clouds today to go with the name, scooting about in every direction as the wind gusted. At one point I was sitting on a rock and eating some crackers and jerky when a strong gust came and actually blew my full backpack down a hill.
The view from Pterodactyl Pass
Lupines in front of Horn Col
Horn Col
Me looking consternated in the wind
Copper Mine Pass from the descent. It’s the u-shaped notch in the center. You can’t see it, but Carrot and Kodak are tiny human figures descending near the top.
Cloud Canyon, and clouds.
From Cloud Canyon, I had a long uphill, first on trail for a couple miles (the first since leaving Lodgepole) and then cross country through leprechaun green grass and sparkling white granite blocks. It was beautiful, and the sun even managed to make an appearance for a while. The wind got quiet too, and I could hear my labored breathing as I slowly moved upward. I was definitely tired. It had been a long day without much rest. But there is almost no better place to be tired, than in the company of oneself and a mountain stream, at the same time both inward and outward.
Talus Creek
After the creek, I made my way over to Talus Pass and descended a couple hundred feet down some fractures in steep granite slabs, into a lightly forested bowl, my target for the night, where I’m hoping I’ll be a little better sheltered if another storm comes through.
The lightly forested bowl where I made camp.
On the approach to Copper Mine Pass, I ran into a pair of hikers also hiking the Kings Canyon High Basin Route, though they started in a different place and are over half done. They go by Carrot and Kodak (Carrot has a hiking blog too: https://carrotquinn.com/). We walked some together today, and leap frogged for most of the rest of the day. It is a different feeling to sense that there are others nearby, who might be along any minute, who you can have a conversation with. On the topic of deformation, people change the shape of the space we occupy, more than anything else. I enjoyed them, and I enjoyed the stark contrast their tenuous presence offered to the rest of my trip. I also mentioned to them my missing box at Lodgepole and my map situation, and they supplied me with maps and the written directions since they had had two sets between them. So even though the weather has gone crazy, at least there is my map problem solved.
But as I lay here, with intermittent strong gusts but nothing as fierce as last night, I’m hopeful that storm is passing.
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